world literature series-Age of Iron

At a time when apartheid was still in power in South Africa, Mrs. Curran, a retired professor of classical literature, had a life of benefit as a white man. It's not until the end of her life that she faces a wave of fear in apartheid. In her bedroom balcony, soaring smoke is seen in Cape Platts, the black housekeeper she hires, and Becky son of Florence is killed, and her friend John, who enters the house, is shot to death by police. With her slowly approaching death, there are only homeless Percale, who lives at her disposal, and a dog he carries around. It's the "iron age," a wretchedly beautiful variation-like piece that is intertwined with an account of the barbarity and impending death of the apartheid regime.

The novel's title, "The Iron Age," refers to a miserable era in which humans hold iron weapons and aim at each other's hearts. In apartheid-era South Africa, where "the Iron Age" is set, a national crisis that could be said to have caused a civil war between blacks and whites. Racial confrontation is escalating into uncontrollable violence, enough to ask a police officer, "Was it a world where an unarmed man can live?" when the narrator of the work, "I, or Mrs. Curran, asked where the pistol found in her house was located. Schools in black neighborhoods are closed, and police chase and attack children recklessly. When Mrs. Karen asked why she had a deep antipathy toward the school, Becky replies: "What's school like? It's where we fit ourselves into the apartheid system." Mrs. Karen thinks these kids are made of iron. Florence's idea is no different from Becky's. Florence, who says, "We're proud of these kids," is like Mrs. Sparta, whose heart is iron. Even so, it is uncertain when the era of iron will end.

The novel, which consists of a letter to the one and only daughter who lives far from the U.S., is filled with the shame of a white man who helped the vicious system of apartheid. Mrs. Karen suffers from despair, saying, "There seems to be no limit to the shame that humans can feel." "We shoot at these people like they're trash. But after all, it's us who aren't worth living."

As a white man, Quixie is a writer who is deeply conscious of his vested interests. He has consistently shown through his works that the reckless reproduction of hitters living in different locations can be violence that conveys their eyes. Instead of trying to recreate their existential lives by focusing on blacks such as Percale, John, Florence, Becky and Tabani in "The Iron Age," they dissect the inner side of the perpetrator, and stare at their contradictions. He is keenly conscious that it could be a false or cheap sentiment to reenact and represent the experiences of blacks driven to death by the apartheid regime at the center of the narrative. Mrs. Karen also asks her daughter. If there is a lie, a plea and an excuse in her letter, don't forgive easily. Read all this with cold eyes.

She's been sentenced to a time limit for cancer and doesn't want to die in an ugly state as she is now. She wants to be saved. How can I be saved? The answer she found was "to love something that is not lovely." Love her friend John, who is as lively and imaginative as Becky, who can't find a single loveliest corner like him, and the homeless Percale, who exudes all kinds of nasty smells, including the smell of dirty wine, mold, and foot odor. Mrs. Karen thinks. "I don't trust percale, so I trust perc I love him because I don't love him. I lean on him because he's a weak reed." Loving what you can't love, trusting what you can't trust, accepting vulnerability and death. That is the maximum atonement she can make. It is also an effort to help the soul survive in an iron age where the soul is not welcomed.

a plot
The Iron Age" is the representative work of Wuxi, who dedicates on various levels the tragedy of South Africa marred by racism and violence through the eyes of a white woman dying of cancer. apartheid is fiercely accused of the state-led barbaric apartheid with heart-staring sentences.

Introduction to Writers-J. M. Wuxi.
He was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1940. He graduated from Cape Town University and moved to the U.S. in 1965 to earn a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Austin, Texas. For about three years from 1968, he began writing novels, lecturing on English literature at the University of New York. He also lectured at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Chicago. He returned to his home country in 1972 and served as an English professor at Cape Town University and retired in 2001. Since then, he has moved to Australia to teach literature at Adelaide University.
Debuting as a novelist in 1974 with the release of 'The Dark Land,' Wuxi won South Africa's best literary award for her second novel, 'In the Heart of the Country,' and gained worldwide fame for 'Waiting for the Wild.' Breaking the precedent of not giving twice to a writer for "Michael K" and "Chirac," she has won two Booker Awards, including the Etrangje Feminine Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the Iris Times International novel prize. And in 2003, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, along with a review that "sharply criticized the moral hypocrisy of Western civilization with its polite composition, rich dialogue and sharp insight."
Other major works include "Po," "The Iron Age," "The Master of Petersburg," "Slow Man," "Diary of One Bad Year," autobiographical novel trilogy "Boyhood," "Youthhood" and "Summertime," and a number of essays and research books.